How can Pinterest help my SEO?

Pinterest is a fast growing trend. It currently drives more traffic than YouTube, Google+ and Linkedin combined. It acts as a visual pin board, a curated online magazine covering a plethora of topics. It attracts a variety of pinners, which are of a different type from Twitter and Facebook. Getting statistic, 50% of Pinterest users have children, the majority are between 25 – 44 and 28.1% of users have a household income of more than £100,000+.

Pinterest users spend an average of 15.8 minutes on the site compared to Facebook (12.1 minutes) and Twitter (3.3 minutes) which means that a presence here provides you with captive audience who will only buy into your brand but pass it along to their fellow pinners as they show their support!

Promoting a lifestyle

If you want to use Pinterest for business purposes, you need to be upfront and specific about what it is that your business offers. Devote your primary Pinterest boards to this – you are promoting a lifestyle! As with all social media, it’s good to show your characters, but it would be a wasted opportunity to just use it for self promotion.

Rearrange your boards so that the most interesting are at the top, an obvious tip, perhaps! But image is everything on Pinterest.

Increase your SEO

Pinterest is unlike most social networks in that it holds legitimate SEO value. Make sure that when you pin your own content, you provide links that will direct traffic to your website. Be descriptive in what you have pinned, and also what you have re-pinned.

You can add keywords, using hashtags in much the same way as you use Twitter.

You can also pin videos – and as videos make up a 1/3 of web traffic, and people are 4 times more likely to click on video than anything else, it’s great to make sure videos are pinned! It was estimated that by July 2012 50% of all consumer traffic will come from online video.

Be part of the Pinterest community

Welcome comments, and ask questions in the description for followers to answer. Pinterest users like pinners who will get involved and do more than just post their own content so it’s worth creating a few boards where you can pin other things that you like. These might be directly related to your market – inspiration or themes that complement your own – or something that expands on your character as a brand. Anything from photos of extreme hobbies to recipes

You can contribute to group boards (although you will have to be invited) and you can also invited others to contribute to yours. Perhaps add a VIP board for your customers; it could be the perfect vehicle for a bit of market research. Look for the popular pins, what does the Pinterest community favour?

Do you sell products?

Pinterest has a handy tool for being able to search for gifts – if you add a price tag to your description (in dollars or sterling) then the price automatically appears in the corner. Visitors to the site can search for items within a certain price range.

Ensure your blog can be pinned

Make sure your website is easily pinable! Your content will spread quickly if you make it easier for people.

Then, you can view whether any content on your website has been pinned, by using this handy URL: http://pinterest.com/source/your_url/ for example http://pinterest.com/source/adozeneggs.co.uk/

Useful for private use

Are you planning a trip? Organising an event? Or redecorating your house? Pinterest means that you could find lots of inspiration quickly! Search for boards rather than pins, and you will find a much larger collection of inspiration.

Is it working?

Do make sure you look at the analytics – you will be able to see what is working, and what isn’t!